David Hutcheson works out his past in poetry

Rocky Mount, N.C., is a small city bounded on all sides by low-lying fields of cotton and tobacco. For David Hutcheson, who was born and raised there, it was a fun place to be young.

“Playing meant kids stealing stuff from construction sites to build things, riding your bikes into the woods,” he says. But as Hutcheson grew older, the town became economically depressed. Manufacturing jobs vanished, and a flood from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 devastated the region. All the ills of rural desolation followed. “Everyone uses a lot of drugs,” he says. “It’s part of growing up. Stealing cough medicine, scoring weed.”

He left Rocky Mount for college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then moved to New York City, where he tended bar and studied at Hunter College’s MFA program in creative writing.

“My whole 20s, I ran from being a caretaker,” he says. “I ran from my family. In many ways I’m estranged.” But while writing a lyric poem in New York, or sitting in an all-night diner in Queens, he found himself inevitably returning to the dark landscape of Rocky Mount.

Hutcheson, now a first-year writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, will give a reading of his poetry there this Saturday at 6:30 p.m.

“I write about my dad’s relationship with work, some family member’s relationships with addiction,” he says. “These things keep coming back to me.”

His father grew up in central Florida, working on a neighbor’s farm. He worked the night shift in a slaughterhouse to put himself through college, where he studied animal science, “because,” Hutcheson says, “that was what he knew.” And though he ended up doing quality control for Burger King, Hutcheson says that what his father really wanted was to work for the U.S. Forest Service.

“He hated his office job, and would come home and drink. There’s a toxic masculinity there — not showing emotions except aggression or anger. But when it comes down to it, he’s a passive man, a drinking man. There’s a lot of tenderness there, in trying to understand someone who for so many years you’ve put yourself in opposition to.”

After graduate school, Hutcheson ended up paying the bills by working in a metal shop. “I was grinding metal for ten hours a day,” he says. “I went to college and graduate school, I studied poetry, but then I found myself doing physically demanding labor in a brusque, intense, masculine environment. I was clearly trying to work something about my past out in this.”

Writing for him is a delicate process. “The best poems are those that, when you read them, there’s a part of them that gets stuck in the back of your throat,” he says. “My poetry starts with a sound, something that captures the aura of a place. It’s a musical impulse, a feeling on the tip of the brain, and you use everything around you to try to articulate it. It’s like when you’re struggling to turn a key in an old lock. You just have to hold your mouth right as you twist.”

In Hutcheson’s work, there’s the past and there are daydreams about the past that glide alongside it. For example, he’s currently writing about a road trip he had hoped to take with his little brother.

“It was Nicky’s idea to do it by getting our commercial driver’s licenses,” Hutcheson says, after which they would work and drive their way across America. If only: “He’s in prison,” Hutcheson adds. “This is poetry about imagined time. Here I am, in this isolated community, with these incredible, creative people, and he’s living a totally different life. There’s a longing there.”

And a vision. “I would want to go out west,” Hutcheson says. “I’ve never been. Nicky is very athletic. He was a basketball star. We could do some rock climbing together.”